Working women and working men – A country divided

When I wrote about Delhi’s extremely low female workforce participation rates last weekend, several people emailed asking if I had numbers for their states. It’s something I’m curious about too, and there’s a lot to be learnt from inter-state comparisons.

(Brief aside on data: the latest data on labour force participation comes from the 2009-10 National Sample Survey. Unfortunately, the latest round does not have city-level data, nor is Census 2011 data on workers out. So the best I can do is look at inter-state rural/ urban data.)

The Labour Force Participation Rate or the LFPR is the total number of persons employed and seeking work as a proportion of the total population. So if City X has 1 lakh women aged 15 and above of whom 40,000 are employed and 10,000 are unemployed but seeking work, then City X’s adult female LFPR would be 50%. While employment and unemployment rates can tell you a lot about a state’s economy, the LFPR, especially when it comes to women, tells you about economy, employment and that great intangible – “culture”.

In 2009-10, the states with the highest urban adult female LFPR were Mizoram (highest at 42.2%), Lakshadweep, Meghalaya, Kerala and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Of these, Meghalaya has a very small urban population (just 20 per cent of its population), while Lakshadweep and A&N have very small populations as a whole. So if we were to leave these three out, India’s top 5 states for urban adult female LFPR would be: Mizoram, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, all of them at or over 25 per cent. (If we were to make a No Union Territories rule, then Himachal Pradesh would come in at 5th after AP. But I won’t make this a rule because Puducherry’s population is actually bigger than Mizoram’s, and its urban population is far bigger. So Puducherry stays.)

Unsurprisingly, urban female literacy in four of these states was over 80 per cent in 2011, while Andhra Pradesh’s was 75 per cent. Mizoram’s urban female literacy rate is over 97 per cent, an astounding achievement that I don’t think it gets enough credit for.

At the bottom of the list are (discounting the tiny UTs of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu): Goa, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and right at the bottom – Delhi.

What’s really interesting is that the Top 5 list for women has almost zero overlap with the Top 5 states for male urban LFPR: Gujarat (highest at 79.8 per cent), Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal/ Orissa (tied for 5th place at 78.3 per cent). It could be argued that in states like Gujarat, Punjab and West Bengal where male urban LFPR is high, the opportunities for employment seem to exist, so other, possibly cultural, factors could be contributing to the low urban female LFPR in these states.

What do urban working women do? In Mizoram, rural and urban areas are far less sharply defined than in a Maharashtra or a Tamil Nadu, and almost half of urban working women in the state work in agriculture and forestry. In Himachal too, agriculture employs 20 per cent of urban working women. For the other states, the story is for the most part one of manufacturing – 34.5 per cent of TN’s urban working women and 31.6 per cent of AP’s are employed in manufacturing.

Now let’s look at rural India, where most of India lives. In general, rural adult female LFPR tends to be higher than urban because women are overwhelmingly employed in agriculture. The top 5 states for rural women are: Himachal Pradesh (far and away the highest at 64.3 per cent), Andhra Pradesh, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh and Meghalaya. So HP, AP and Mizoram are the three states that feature in the Top 5 or 6 for both rural and urban adult female LFPR.

What about rural men? Top 5: Mizoram (highest), Gujarat, Karnataka, West Bengal and Tripura. Again, just one overlap with women: Mizoram.

The female LFPR is an amazingly complex indicator. On the one hand, women from poorer families tend to have a greater need to work so poorer and more agricultural states could be expected to have high female LFPRs. On the other, urban employment for women requires a certain degree of skill, so better educated states with a higher manufacturing base will have high female LFPRs. And then there’s culture, which we can see all around us playing an important role in a family’s decision whether or not to allow its women to work.

At the national level, and at the level of several otherwise economically advanced states, the low female LFPR is an issue of concern. But in other states, as we saw, the female LFPR is comparable to developed countries. India’s employment story is a complicated one, and all of the numbers above just remind me of how little national averages tell us.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Rukmini Shrinivasan is an assistant editor with The Times of India in Delhi. She writes on rural India and labour. She loves working with data, but likes travelling and talking to people marginally more. She is trained in social communications and the political economy of development. Originally from Pune and Mumbai, she’s still finding her feet - and her way - in Delhi.

Rukmini Shrinivasan is an assistant editor with The Times of India in Delhi. She writes on rural India and labour. She loves working with data, but likes tr. . .

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Author

Rukmini Shrinivasan is an assistant editor with The Times of India in Delhi. She writes on rural India and labour. She loves working with data, but likes travelling and talking to people marginally more. She is trained in social communications and the political economy of development. Originally from Pune and Mumbai, she’s still finding her feet - and her way - in Delhi.

Rukmini Shrinivasan is an assistant editor with The Times of India in Delhi. She writes on rural India and labour. She loves working with data, but likes tr. . .